


just know i’m just like you

by aceofdiamonds



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, Post-Mockingjay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 14:23:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1229752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aceofdiamonds/pseuds/aceofdiamonds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Charming," he says, frowning. He holds out a loaf of bread and a bag of cheese buns. Haymitch thinks he knows the kid well enough after all this time, he’s never exactly been a closed book, but then he got hijacked and sure he might be as back to normal as he can be but there's a look in his eye right now that tells Haymitch maybe he's not being too paranoid in thinking the bread might be laced with poison. "I've seen you and --" he stops, bites his lip, then gets over it. "You and Katniss."</p>
<p>There it is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just know i’m just like you

He turns forty-two on a Thursday. His birthday present comes in the form of Katniss straddling him, her hands on his chest and her mouth falling open in little moans he wants to store in one of the empty bottles beside his bed. He turns them over, his hand gripping the sheets beside her hand, and they both know this isn't a power play but some last ditch attempt at holding on to youth because he’s forty-two now and fuck that sounds old. She smirks up at him and wraps her legs around his waist, her nails digging into his shoulder. 

She falls asleep beside him, the brief flash of bliss when she came with a gasp, her head falling back as she tightened around him, now replaced by the more common frown. He watches her sleep, refrains from stroking the hair back from her cheek, because it's not like that, it never has been, and they're both fine with that. 

He wakes up alone the morning after his forty-second birthday which is how most days start anyway, it's unwise to expect anything different. He sits up so he's sprawled against the headboard and feels for the bottle beside his bed. The other half of the bed is cold.

\--

The kid comes back a couple of months after that. He expects things to change. For the wake up calls with water and whatever she managed to hunt that morning to stop along with the smiles he manages to get out of her sometimes, the easy to and fro they've always had the potential for and that they’ve finally let evolve between them becoming a thing of the past. 

But the kid comes back and Haymitch's world keeps turning. 

\--

"How long did you wait before you turned to drink?" she asks one afternoon when it's storming outside and there's nothing better to do than flip through books and talk about nothing. He's trying not to drink around her so much. He's trying to not to think about hidden meanings regarding that. 

He blinks, taken aback by the inability to find an answer. "The day Snow shot everyone I loved I found a bottle in my mother's cupboard, and the rest is, of course, history."

"Does it help your sleeping?" 

Nightmares. This is what it's coming back to. 

He laughs, then. It’s all he can do. "Sweetheart, I've been trying for twenty seven years and I haven't found a cure yet." 

She nods like this is what she was expecting, and then turns back to her book. Conversation over. He picks up his bottle. Fuck her. 

\--

She gets him out hunting with her one day which is proof if he ever needed it that he has no control over his life anymore. He bitches all the way along the trail but he likes the fresh air and it's something else being able to see Katniss right where she's most at home. 

She turns round and shushes him when he gives another half-hearted moan, doing that smile that only comes out sometimes and makes him feel like he really earned it. He winks. The smile widens. 

\--

Peeta appears on his doorstep the morning of the monthly delivery from the Capitol. 

Haymitch, he doesn't know what to do here. They don't talk about Peeta, him and Katniss. There's a whole lot of selfish reasons as to why, all of them stemming from that voice inside him telling him she'll be leaving him for the any day now, but he doesn't bring up for her benefit too. He knows how broken up she is over him, even all these months later when she smiles more and doesn't spend so many days locked away. She loved him, in whatever way she thought, she still does, in a way, and look, that look in the kid's eyes tells Haymitch that flame he's carried his whole life hasn't gone out. 

"Haymitch." 

"Peeta," he nods in return. There's flowers growing in the dirt just beside his steps. It must be nearly spring; he doesn't own a calendar, Katniss keeps him right about the delivery days. Springs means Peeta's been back -- been home, if that's what you want to call it; he probably does -- for two months now. Shit. "How's the brain?" 

"Charming," he says, frowning. He holds out a loaf of bread and a bag of cheese buns. Haymitch thinks he knows the kid well enough after all this time, he’s never exactly been a closed book, but then he got hijacked and sure he might be as back to normal as he can be but there's a look in his eye right now that tells Haymitch maybe he's not being too paranoid in thinking the bread might be laced with poison. "I've seen you and --" he stops, bites his lip, then gets over it. "You and Katniss."

There it is. 

He's stuck again at how to handle this. He's too sober for this. "Do you want a drink?" 

The kid laughs, the harshness of it wrong coming from his mouth. "She told me you'd stopped." 

"Yeah? And you believed that?" It might be spring but it's cold standing here in the doorway. 

"It seemed the most plausible out of everything she said." 

“I suppose it did.” He wonders how Katniss phrased it, whatever this thing between them is. He wonders what else was said and then decides it’s none of his business. Those two, they’re in a world of their own and it’s all Haymitch can do to hold on and maybe get something out of it at the end. Their brilliant mentor.

A clenched jaw almost has him stepping back but the expected punch is deserved, when it all comes down to it. It doesn't come of course because this kid, this fucking kid who has had his heart on his sleeve since day one, all it comes down to with him is her happiness.

Her happiness is something he's fuelling, apparently, which comes as something as a surprise. It's what makes Peeta sigh and step back and this boy has been dealt possibly the shittiest hand Haymitch has ever seen which is really saying something. He's looking at him in a way that makes Haymitch feel guiltier than all those hours he let the kid lie in the mud with a bloody leg with no aid from the sponsors.

"Peeta --"

"Just. Don't take her for granted."

He takes this as something of an insult.

\--

The nightmares never change. Or, they do, with a new cast being brought in every so often, more recent friends and allies taking the places of his competitors back in the arena. He kills them all every night, always the same, only now when he wakes with a shout, his heart beating so fast and his palms clammy, now there's a hand on his shoulder, his cheek, pulling him back to reality.

Her nightmares end with her pushing her face into his chest, her screams muffled just barely. He holds her, smoothing back her hair and murmuring nonsense into her ear until she quiets to a shivering stop. He doesn’t tell her they’ll stop some day because, like he said before, they don’t, and they don’t lie to each other, it’s their thing.

This allowance of help, of comfort, for either of them, is as official an acknowledgement to some form of relationship as they’re going to get.

\--

She takes him out hunting again because he enjoyed it _so much_ the last time, only this time she takes him further, glancing back every now and again to make another promise of _it’s not much further_.

They come to a lake, eventually. A pretty small lake with a cabin beside it. He sits on the grass down by the water and watches the way she opens up, in her little piece of heaven. He thinks he’s seen her happy before, as happy as she could possibly be after everything, but there’s happy and then there’s the look on Katniss’ face when the sun hits her face and she smiles, open and free.

He likes to think he’s not sentimental, that he's been desensitised after years of experiencing the dark secrets of the Capitol, of sending off two innocent kids to an all but guaranteed death, but these two kids have gotten under his skin and he might have fucked one over but he’s got the other here lying on the grass beside him and there’s something inside of him that wants to make her happy more often than not.

It’s an impossible goal, when he thinks about it, but then again a couple of years ago so was two victors from District 12.

“My father taught me how to swim here,” she tells him a while later when the sun is high in the sky.

It’s the first time she’s mentioned her father to him. “I always wondered how you managed.”

“Do you know how to?”

“I don’t, no, and you’re not teaching me,” he adds before she can say what he knows she’s going to. They’re very similar, see. They always have been. Neither of them can decide if it’s a positive or negative thing.

“And what if I fell in and drowned,” she says, tilting her head up from where it’s resting on his shoulder. She’s smiling to show she’s joking but Haymitch answers anyway. “I’d jump in and save you.”

“Why?”

There’s an abundance of answers here. “Because I’m your mentor, sweetheart.”

He kisses her when she stays quiet for too long, cupping her chin with his hand. She leans into it, sighing against his mouth, and then he breathes and she’s straddling him while he’s flat on his back. He laughs, pulls her closer, and later, when she’s doing that smile again like she doesn’t realise how happy she is, he feels a swell of accomplishment.

\--

It’s been six months and they haven’t spoken about Peeta. He drops bread off some days and Haymitch knows she knows about this because she makes toast and slathers it with jam, but they don’t say anything. He doesn’t know if she speaks to him outside of the house but he hopes she does, and he doesn’t tell her when he stops by the bakery and asks how he’s doing.

He tells himself this is happening because they’re all trying to avoid hurting each other but the decrease of booze and this new goal to make her happier is making him think clearer and think _nicer_ , and so when Katniss turns twenty Haymitch invites Peeta to the small party along with the Hawthornes and Greasy Sae and whoever wants to turn up.

After everyone is gone the three of them sit in the living room and drink wine like they’re from somewhere else and everything that happened didn’t. It’s awkward at first, even with Haymitch and Katniss sitting on different chairs, but Peeta, that star of the interviews, knows how to make everyone else somewhat comfortable, even if the mask he’s wearing is almost completely transparent. They talk about Effie’s new job in District Five and the height Annie and Finnick’s son must be at now. It’s small talk, words full of nothing much at all, and it’s not them but it’s all they can manage for tonight. When Peeta leaves he looks more like the one from before than he has since he came back.

He fucks her slowly that night, kissing her sloppily and pressing his fingers on her clit just the way she likes it. She holds on and doesn’t let go until he’s almost asleep. His eyes are closed and he’s almost gone when he feels small, gentle fingers in his hair, combing it back.

\--

The nightmares are marginally less. So is the drinking.

\--

“How did you cope, all those years alone?”

She throws these questions out in the moments he’s least expecting it. He’s up a ladder at the moment, trying to get that damn cat out of the gutter, and the bluntness of her question makes him freeze.

“I didn’t think you asked stupid questions, sweetheart.”

“Humour me.”

“I didn’t cope.”

“It doesn’t seem fair,” she says from the ground, because of course this conversation is happening with a ladder between them and the possibility of anyone to overhear them. “That you suffered all those years alone.”

“Life isn’t fair. I thought you knew that.” He turns back to the cat, narrowing his eyes at the beast. He gets a flick of a tail in return.

“I understand why you drink, I think that’s what I’m trying to say.”

The cat bites him.

\--

There’s something about luck here. Or maybe he should be talking more about miracles, but he’s never been into all that sort of thing so he sticks with the luck. How else could this have happened? After the years of loneliness and drinking, after building up trust between the three of them only to break it in a split second, after death after death after death, and then coming back piece by piece to where it all began. They’re here, in his bed, the mockingjay and the drunk, and no one's out to kill them that they know of, and really what else can they ask for. 

 


End file.
